The voluntary tech guy. Like Batman – but fighting downtime rather than crime.
Validation of email addresses. What a painful subject. About a year ago I looked into the possibility of using SMTP to validate email addresses. As it turns out, it’s not perfect (a lot of false-negatives) but it’s very reliable (I’ve failed to get any false-positives). The following code outlines how this works (written in PHP, […]
Continue ReadingWhile setting up Trac as our company source-code repository yesterday, the question arose of “What about cute HTML emails when SVN commits are made?”. Hmmmm. Thank goodness for SVN hooks – a wonderfully understated feature of subversion! Go to your subversion directory (that created by “svnadmin create”), and enter the “hooks” directory. Create a file, executable […]
Continue ReadingOver the last couple of weeks, I’ve been spending my spare time playing with the Coova AP (ChilliSpot) wireless hotspot service on a WRT54GL. The main problem I’ve had with it is the portal pages not looking so good on mobile devices (particularly iPhone and Androids). A little bit of Googling revealed a solution (at […]
Continue ReadingThis might be useful to someone, somewhere, out there. Those who’re into tinkering with things they shouldn’t will notice that Ebuyer’s search pages include a “limit” GET variable in the results page URL. The upper limit appears to be 30, but going negatively causes a different kettle of fish: http://www.ebuyer.com/search?q=a%25&x=0&y=0&limit=-3000 (That URL is not for […]
Continue ReadingTwo blogs in one weekend. Impressive for me! I’ve made a lot of progress with the Cloud-Bible project (the name is growing on me, slowly). Switching from the simpler-to-follow (but very assuming) big “switch” clause which was previously handling reverse-engineered tags (oh, I didn’t mention the XML I have is not precise OSIS format did […]
Continue ReadingI’ve for a long time enjoyed using e-Sword. It’s a superbly well built package which runs on Microsoft Windows (and partially under Wine on Linux) … which is where I see the downfall. The advantages to sticking with one platform are obvious – speed, usability, feature range, you name it. But that’s just it. You’re […]
Continue ReadingRegarding safe hex, on Linux – a topic at work today: “A wise man once said to me, ‘The root account, you should not be.’ Alas my pride, for great it was, ‘I shall be root, just because!’ Rename this, move off that, Getting rid of some old tat. Then, behold! A stray forward-slash… My […]
Continue ReadingThe last 3 days of my life have been spent wallowing in the deep grave of mud and syrup which is (drum-roll please) “Security Metrics’ PCI-DSS Vulnerability Scanner“. I could rant for 3 pages, oh I really could. I admin a half-dosen of Linux boxes (shortly to be replaced with quite a few more) – […]
Continue ReadingWhile driving home yesterday, I encountered a large round-about on the edge of Bury (where the A14 slip roads converge), where the lights were literally offline. Confusion seemed to be reigning. Nobody knew what to do. Some people just pulled out blindly – treating it as though the lights were “on green”. Others simply waited, […]
Continue ReadingAye, so the peeps turned up, network coverage is at a minimum, but the weather is good (praise the Lord). Thank you to all those who baked cakes, the chocolate digestive was superb – thanks Elane! Hopefully the campfire pic uploads, hello to all you from East Dean!
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